Nature Quotes

The old Lakota was wise, He knew that man's heart, away from nature, becomes hard; he knew that lack of respect for growing, living things soon led to lack of respect for humans too.

Luther Standing Bear

For there are some people who can live without wild things about them and the earth beneath their feet, and some who cannot. To those of us who, in a city, are always aware of the abused and abased earth below the pavement, walking on the grass, watching the flight of birds, or finding the first spring dandelion are the rights as old and unalienable as the rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. We belong to no cult. We are not Nature Lovers. We don't love nature any more than we love breathing. Nature is simply something indispensable, like air and light and water, that we accept as necessary to living, and the nearer we can get to it the happier we are.

Louise Dickinson Rich†

Taste is the intermediate faculty which connects the active with the passive powers of our nature, the intellect with the senses; and its appointed function is to elevate the images of the latter, while it realizes the ideas of the former.

All conservatives are such from personal defects. They have been effeminated by position or nature, born halt and blind, through LUXURY of their parents, and can only, like invalids, act on the defensive.

Here is calm so deep, grasses cease waiting... wonderful how completely everything in wild nature fits into us, as if truly part and parent of us. The sun shines not on us, but in us. The rivers flow not passed, but through us, thrilling, tingling, vibrating every fiber and cell of the substance of our bodies, making them glide and sing.

The universe has been quite literally writing upon humans for many thousands of years, and our alphabets are among the traits that nature has carved in order to cross our minds. Wild lands have caught deeper trails in my life than I will ever be able to make in the forest.

Joe Meeker†

The machine called Nature into an art form. For the first time at men began to regard Nature as a source of aesthetic and spiritual values.

Marshal McLuhan

Finally, there are those whose chief purpose in visiting the forests is simply an escape from civilization. These people want to rest from the endless chain of mechanization and artificiality which bounds their lives. In the forest they temporarily abandon a routine to which they cannot become wholly reconciled, and return to that nature in which hundreds of generations of their ancestors were reared.

Painting is a science and should be pursued as an inquiry into the laws of nature. Why, then, may not a landscape be considered as a branch of natural philosophy, of which pictures are but experiments?

When one cultivates to the utmost the principles of his nature, and exercises them on the principle of reciprocity, he is not far from the path. What you do not like when done to yourself, do not do to others.